As it turns out, we got a little bit of Sun and Moon news today. Makes it a busy day for me blogging, but I suppose that’s not such a bad thing. To be fair, the thing we got isn’t a huge update anyway, but it is interesting and gives some cool potential possibilities.

If you saw my last post about the article I had published today, you’ll know that the fall 2016 semester has started for me, the first semester that I’m serving as one of the editors for the News page for Cal State Fullerton’s Daily Titan newspaper.

My credit as a News Editor in the masthead on page 2 of the Aug. 22 issue of the Daily Titan.

Toward the end of the summer there was a little bit of stress building up at the thought of having new responsibilities on the paper, ones that would make me accountable for not only large amounts of content needing to be created, but also for the grades of students taking Comm 471 (The Daily Titan staff writing capstone class for Communications majors) and, more importantly, for making sure the issues present on campus get addressed.

I probably won’t be writing a long post about every issue we publish considering there’s going to be four issues a week starting in a couple of weeks, but the first deadline night we had was pretty special, so I figured I would ramble a bit and talk about the struggles of putting together a college paper.

This particular issue was special in that it was a week-long issue, so we only had our Sunday production and not our usual Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday productions. Just because we have a lower workload as a while this week doesn’t mean the deadline was easy, however.

We finished production on this issue at 2 A.M. this morning, the morning of our first day of class for the semester. The night ran that late – early? – despite the fact that a few of us on the editorial board arrived three hours early to get work done on the paper. If that doesn’t tell you about what kind of issue it was, I don’t know what else will.

While the work was long and tough, the end result is always sweet to see in print. Especially when I have friends living on campus who will message me about my name and work being on the front page before I even get up to get ready for school.

The front page of the Aug. 22, 2016 issue of the Daily Titan. Notice how 3/4 of the main stories on the page are News section articles written by me, my co-editor and our assistants.

Now, there were a few overarching problems plaguing our deadline night from the offset that I would argue were the main contributors to the 14-15 hour runtime. For one thing, we got a little screwed over as far as advertisement space goes. Normally we get quite a few ads from the Ads department to fill up room on the admittedly large print space for the paper, but we got nearly nothing for this issue. As a result, it took far longer to figure out how to stretch our content into the space we had, a burden mainly on the Layout desk that clearly seemed to take it’s toll.

Pages 2 and 3, the News section for the Aug. 22, 2016 Daily Titan.

We also had a fairly sizable group of “new recruits” that had to learn the ropes of being on the paper, as actually working on the paper is a much different experience than talking about it through orientation. Finally, there were some technological updates done prior to the semester starting that caused problems with printing pages and opening things on certain computers in the newsroom, extending the wait time for finally sending the final paper to be printed by quite a bit.

While there were overarching problems affecting the paper as a whole, there were also some issues specific to stories in my own section. First and foremost, the stabbing story that fills the top banner on the front page. Out of all the exciting ways to start off the semester, two students getting stabbed the morning of the deadline is certainly pretty high up there. We obviously had to do some last minute coverage on what happened, and even with two reporters working on the story it wasn’t able to be completed until later on in the night thanks to some difficulty with sources and Fraternity politics.

Megan Maxey’s story on the Poverty Simulation for Nursing Students suffered a similar last minute deadline story fate, and my own story about the TSU and Western State College was very, very long, requiring some last minute word cuts even with the extra space we had from a lack of advertisements. You also may have noticed that I wrote all three of the briefs on the inside edge of page 2, a symptom of a lack of people available to work. They’re not necessarily hard – just 100 words on a story we’ve found online – but still.

The last big challenge of the stories in the issue was the story Jillian Salas wrote about CSUF President Mildred Garcia’s Convocation Address. While her work was perfectly fine in its own right, I personally screwed up the coverage a little by forgetting to send a photographer to cover the event. Without our own photos, we were stuck either having to use courtesy photos (something we don’t use on the front page) or creating a graphic to address the four points of CSUF’s Strategic Plan – a major talking point in the President’s speech. Obviously we went with the former, but even then trying to fit it onto the page was a bit awkward and we needed a very large photo caption to help fill the space.

Finally, we came to the problem of story headlines. Now inherently, headlines aren’t such a terrible thing. They’re quick and meant to describe the content of the story it accompanies in some capacity. The problem comes when there isn’t a lot of room to write a headline in, making it harder to find the right words to use. That’s not all either, for stories on the front page that bleed into another page – such as Garcia’s speech and my buildings update – you need to make two headlines that have to be totally different in content. Add to that a third “deck” subheading that also has to be different than the other two and you wind up struggling to come up with a variety of things to say.

This issue also included a special insert, our New Student Orientation (NSO) guide.

Why the guide wasn’t passed out during the actual NSO over the summer that we created it for is beyond me, but here it is included along with our first major production for the semester.

While the creation of the guide is admittedly more of a way to sell a lot of ads to kick off the semester, it does have a few articles written by members of the Daily Titan Editorial Board. More fluff stories than hard news, but technically it was meant to come out well before the semester started, so there was understandably not all that much to cover.

A bit of pride I personally draw from the NSO guide comes from this page, which depicts a map of the places you can park on campus and a few advertisements.

Typically we have our Layout editor and his assistants put our page’s structures together, but for the NSO guide the ads department did most of the initial work. This page, however, was incredibly awkward in how it was first constructed. There was very little room for the map, and the way our illustrator made the image itself didn’t lend itself to the space we had. So, while our Layout editor was off doing other things, it was up to someone else to help try and put the page design together.

That someone, if the build-up didn’t make it obvious, was me. I was able to show off the skills I accumulated through my editorial years on RUHS’s High Tide newspaper by editing the page design so everything could work, and I greatly impressed the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor as a result. All and all not a bad thing to do.

If nothing else, probably the best thing I can say about our deadline night last night was that it was a wonderful bonding period. Now matter how frustrating and drawn out the work tended to become, at least I was suffering with friends who were all going through the same thing. On top of that, things like lunch/dinner and the inevitable delirium that snuck in once the witching hour came around made for wonderful chances to get to know the people I’m working with better, especially those who are going to be helping out at my desk. Even though CSUF is a commuter campus, lots of people still like to give me skeptical or disappointed looks when I mention that I’ve been a commuter since day one, having not decided to try the on-campus dorm experience for my undergraduate life. It’s mostly a monetary concern that led to the decision in the end, but most people cite the lack of connection to other people at school as reason why it was a poor choice. While I can understand the concern, I’d argue that my early and ongoing level of involvement in school institutions like the Daily Titan really offset them in a big, bad way. I am involved and making friends, and I probably spend more time on campus than a lot of other people who don’t live there – so who cares if I decide to save a little extra money in the meantime? Besides, having some extra quiet drive time is nice if you ask me.

However, there is one final thing of note about this particular production that I think is pretty amazing:

This semester’s run of the Daily Titan is the 100th volume. The paper has been around for 50 years and runs two volumes for the fall and spring semesters, thus we’ve reached 100 volumes. It’s a heck of a milestone for the paper as a whole, for sure… But what stands out about it most for me is that I get to be a part of the hundredth volume. My (admittedly very long) buildings update story is part of the front page for the first issue of this special milestone.

And that’s pretty amazing to me.

As another slightly unrelated note, one thing I learned from being at the CSUF campus late is that all the Team Instinct players like to take command of the gyms in Pokémon GO when they know nobody will be awake to overturn their rule.

Plus, it’s a really good place to find some real life Pokémon at 2:30 in the morning. Just saying.

Excuse the lousy lighting, there’s a rabbit hidden in the shadows there somewhere.

The fall 2016 semester has officially begun, and therefore my responsibilities as an editor have kicked off as well. For the very first issue of this semester’s run of the paper, I wrote an article updating some information on two different buildings both on and around campus.

First, the Cal State Fullerton Titan Student Union (TSU) expansion project that began in July 2015 will be completed soon. While the original advertised plan was that the expansion would be opening in spring 2017 due to El Niño rains and other potential delays, the project is well ahead of schedule and should be finishing up by this September instead. The official grand opening ceremony is being planned for October 20th, even if the expansion itself is open to the public before then.

Also, we were able to get a sneak peek of the construction thanks to the generosity of Carol McDoniel, the ASI Director of Administrations. So, if you check out the full story you can see some of the work being done on one of the main staircases within the three floor atrium.

Second, the story addresses the Western State College of Law building that Cal State Fullerton’s Auxiliary Services Corporation (ASC) purchased in 2012. While space in the paper didn’t facilitate too much coverage of this development, I still get the chance to address what groups are moving into the library part of the campus that came with the purchase, as well as what groups are moving into the four-story building that came with the purchase.

If you want to see the story in its entirety, you can see it here. You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!

Because I spent a lot of the day hanging out with my friend Samantha yesterday, I didn’t really have the chance to write up anything on the new Pokémon trailer we got yesterday. While there isn’t a huge amount to say considering we’ve seen three-quarters of the new monsters through an earlier CoroCoro leak, there is one totally new Pokémon and some interesting things to update about the ones we’ve seen, so I figure it’s still worth talking about this trailer. For my records here, if nothing else.

With all that silly real-life exposition out of the way, let’s get into the meat of the more interesting video game news of the day. As if to celebrate my newfound (but short-living) freedom, a brand new Pokémon was unveiled at Gamescon 2016, so let’s check it out! Once again, it’ll all be under the cut for people looking to avoid any sort of spoilers.

Today was the official last day of my summer Political Philosophy course. With both this one and the Abnormal Psychology class finished, I’m totally done with all the summer school obligations I signed myself up for. It feels nice honestly… Even if the Fall Semester at Fullerton is set to start on Monday, so there isn’t too much of a break in store for me before then.

However, even then we’ve already started production on the Daily Titan, and our first issue’s deadline night is Sunday, so I’m already working pretty hard to coordinate all of my writers and photographers to get everything finished by then. Admittedly it’s a bit overwhelming, having to balance school starting up and my new extensive responsibilities as an Editor on the newspaper, but with Political Philosophy out of the way it really does feel like a huge weight has been lifted.

Not that the class was necessarily hard by any means, really it was a fun experience. Both of the classes I took at El Camino College were, as Abnormal Psychology helped play more into my potential interest in going for a psych minor through how interesting it was and Political Philosophy introduced me to a lot of (obviously) philosophical topics that I otherwise wouldn’t have necessarily looked at. On top of that, I got to read some classical texts through the class that I’ve been taught about since my early high school days: Niccolò Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality”, J.S. Mill’s “On Liberty” and Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” among them.

Out of sheer dumb luck, the final exam for the class threw all the questions at me I was hoping wouldn’t be thrown at me, but at the very least I studied those related topics harder because I was less confident with them, so it all balanced out well.

Like I said before, our first serious Daily Titan newspaper production is on Sunday, so by Monday I should have some stuff to show off in that vein. At the same time, the summer issue of BOOM! Magazine should be close to release, so I’ll be able to show off some stuff from that as well once it does. Look forward to it, because I know I am!

In light of about half a dozen leaks ranging from the CoroCoro Magazine pictures to actual early released images from the trailer originally set to premiere on Friday, the Pokémon Company decided to release the new Sun and Moon trailer early. Honestly, can’t really blame them for it, after all it seems like just about everything new and exciting that came with this one was unveiled early. So, while this trailer doesn’t necessarily teach us a lot, it does clarify and add some extra information to things we already knew about. If you haven’t seen it check it out, cause it’s still pretty great stuff.

While we had a bunch of new Pokémon information leaked yesterday and a bunch more is expected to be released on Friday, one more image leaked from CoroCoro today. It’s not a lot, but I still figured I would talk about it because it’s a pretty cool new Pokémon in my opinion. As usual, the content will be under a read more for the sake of anyone who wants to avoid spoilers, but with that said let’s get on with it.

5:28 p.m. EDIT: So as it turns out, the leak from earlier today wasn’t the only thing that was going to be leaked. This leak isn’t from CoroCoro magazine like the others have been this week, instead they seem to simply be leaked from the trailer which should be showing on Friday. Due to the nature of this therefore being unconfirmed, I’ll refrain from talking about it personally, but it was apparently likely enough to at least get a mention on Serebii, so I figured I would share the link to that if you want to see it. Check here for the currently unconfirmed extra leaked information!

It’s always a good day when we get some new Pokémon news, if you ask me. Even though we’re still pretty fresh off the heels of the absolutely huge update that came about a week ago, CoroCoro Magazine has had some more new stuff leaked from their upcoming issue. I might be a little late to the party this time, but there’s still some interesting stuff to talk about, so I’ll do just that!

Among the new goodies this time around we have some new Pokémon for Gen 7, some new Alolan form Pokémon and even the first bits of information about the villainous team that’ll be plaguing Alola with their plans to do… Whatever they’re going to do. We don’t know too much yet.

Last night I spent the day over at Cal State Fullerton, working on our first “paper” for the Fall 2016 semester. It wasn’t really a full paper as much as it was just a small advertisement-filled insert of sorts meant to be displayed at the New Student Orientation, but still. It was the first things I’ve gotten to work on as the new News Editor on the Daily Titan’s editorial staff.

There’s another two weeks left before we start our serious productions, at which point posts on here about my journalism stuff should get quite a bit more frequent.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to take advantage of the last bit of free time I have that isn’t taken up by my Political Philosophy class. For today, that meant going out with one of my sister’s friends who invited us out to Palos Verdes to spent time at Abalone Cove, where there’s tide pools to explore.

I got to swim in the ocean, which I haven’t done in quite some time, and we spent time skipping and stacking rocks.

Oh, and naturally, there were plenty of water-type Pokémon to find while we were there, because how could I not look out for them?

The Cove also happened to be right next to Lloyd Wright’s Wayfarers Chapel, which was right up the road. Lloyd Wright being the son of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, naturally.

All and all a pretty good day, I’d say. Sometimes it’s nice to take a little bit of time to relax and enjoy nature – which is still just as pretty here in California despite the eternal drought we’ve been plagued with for an unsung number of years.